Springing into season change (again) #phenology

This week we still have a chance of snow showers on Thursday. That tells me we’re in a transition from third winter to mud season. Mid-week next we can expect a thunderstorm. Could that bring a transition from mud season to actual spring? Maybe, if we’re lucky. “Do you feel lucky, punk?” (As Dirty Harry would ask.)

some years late April looks like this

Photo by J. Harrington

This past winter has been long and dreary enough that I’m almost looking forward to spring cleanup. The dogs are happier when there’s no snow underfoots to complicate doing business [with 4 paws X 2 dogs, underfoot is inadequate]. The pond north of the property is almost all open water and the pools north of County Road 36 are in about the same condition. This afternoon even the sun came out from behind the clouds. Things are improving, at least locally, at least weatherwise. Much of the rest of the world remains in suboptimal condition.

On a brighter front, we can now look and listen for emergent skunk cabbage, mating songs of chorus frogs, budburst and eventual leafout. This morning we noticed a pileated woodpecker on the oak trees east of the red maples in the front yard. Maples which underwent their own budburst in the past day or so. Maybe with my own equivalent of budburst I’ll manage to shake the winter blahs and take on the spring spirits.

Much of the poetry I’ve been reading recently has been written by lesser known poets, or lesser known poems by better known poets. Larry Gavin’s A Fragile Shelter, New and Selected Poems is a fine example of a poet and poems that should be more widely known and read.  Warren Winders’ Wild River, which includes poetry and prose about my old stomping grounds in southeastern Massachusetts, is another. Then, again, I’m fascinated by the startling similarities in the cover photos of Ted Kooser’s well known Local Wonders and Gary Lark’s lesser known Without A Map. Is it a similarity or a distinction between prophets and poets that neither or either is “...not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.”

Spring Snow

By Linda Gregerson

A kind of counter- 

blossoming, diversionary, 

doomed, and like 

the needle with its drop 

of blood a little 

too transparently in 

love with doom, takes 

issue with the season: Not 

(the serviceberry bright 

with explanation) not 

(the redbud unspooling 

its silks) I know I've read 

the book but not (the lilac, 

the larch) quite yet, I still 

have one more card to 

play. Behold 

a six-hour wonder: six 

new inches bedecking the 

railing, the bench, the top 

of the circular table like 

a risen cake. The saplings 

made (who little thought 

what beauty weighs) to bow 

before their elders. 

The moment bears more 

than the usual signs of its own 

demise, but isn't that 

the bravery? Built 

on nothing but the self- 

same knots of air 

and ice. Already 

the lip of it riddled 

with flaws, a sort 

of vascular lesion that 

betokens—what? betokens 

the gathering return 

to elementals. (She 

was frightened 

for a minute, who had 

planned to be so calm.) 

A dripline scoring 

the edge of the walk. 

The cotton batting blown 

against the screen begun 

to pill and molt. (Who 

clothed them out of 

mercy in the skins 

of beasts.) And even 

as the last of the 

lightness continues 

to fall, the seepage 

underneath has gained 

momentum. (So that 

there must have been a 

death before 

the death we call the 

first or what became 

of them, the ones 

whose skins were taken.) 

Now the more- 

of-casting-backward-than-of- 

forward part, which must 

have happened while I wasn't 

looking or was looking 

at the skinning knives. I think 

I'll call this mercy too.

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